I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.

Films have degenerated to their original operation as carnival amusement - they offer not drama but thrills.

The Oscars demonstrate the will of the people to control and judge those they have elected to stand above them (much, perhaps, as in bygone days, an election celebrated the same).

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"

When the three branches of government have failed to represent the citizenry and the mass of the media has failed to represent the citizenry, then the citizenry better represent the citizenry.

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

Opportunity may knock, but it seldom nags.

We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

Being a writer in Hollywood is like going to Hitler's Eagle Nest with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

Moonlight flooded in the windows and silvered the room, turning it into a lagoon of dreams

Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

Do not let us speak of darker days let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days: these are great days - the greatest days our country has ever lived.

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

Randy Newman seemed like an even worse singer than me. I liked Ray Charles, Levi Stubbs, Jack Jones, Joe Tex, Wilson Pickett.

Racial discrimination is illegal. It's illegal in the United States. It's illegal in Arizona. It has been and it will continue to be.

Everyone ought to take every opportunity to blast lawyers.

We have to have films about action and violence and special effects. That's the sad part, but you know what? It's not me doing it.

I knew it was time to get off of reality TV when someone asked me if I sang as well as acted.